“Oh, God,” Quinn moaned, stumbling. “Oh goodness, oh gracious. I can’t… I… Oh!”
Quinn passed out cold and slumped in Vince’s hold, his dead weight knocking Vince off-balance.
“Quinn!” I screamed.
“Fucking move!” Vince demanded, jabbing Quinn with the gun, but Quinn didn’t so much as flinch.
I saw the moment when Vince realized that his choices were to drag Quinn bodily out to his car in the parking lot where the wedding guests were arriving or to leave him behind. At the last moment, Vince shoved Quinn down the stairs at me, then turned tail and ran. Quinn slammed into me like a wrecking ball, and the two of us went flying back down the stairs to land in a heap on the basement floor with Quinn on top of me.
My men came streaming out of the nearby bedroom.
“Fucking Christ,” Elvo cried, reaching down to help us up.
Riggs and Jordan darted past us up the stairs, no doubt to watch Vince leave and to prevent anyone else from coming down here.
“Hands off,” I barked at Elvo. “Hang on a minute. Quinn fainted, and he might be hurt.” My own body felt like it had been tossed down a boulder field. I’d done my best to protect him as we fell, but there was no way he didn’t have his own set of nasty bruises.
“Baby? Quinn? Sweetheart, it’s over. Please wake up. Where does it hurt?” I cradled his face in my hands, smoothing my thumbs frantically over his cheeks.
Quinn’s big eyes popped open immediately. “Is he gone?” he whispered. “Did I do okay?”
My heart, which had iced over at the idea that he might be unconscious, began beating at double speed. “What?”
“With the fainting. That was a last-minute improvisation.” He rolled off me with a pained groan and settled on the floor. “I definitely hadn’t considered the landing. But I couldn’t think of another way we could make Vince leave with the Horn—and without me—without being too suspicious, you know?”
“What?” I repeated more loudly, rolling so I was braced over him.
“The… Horn?” he repeated uncertainly, looking up at me in concern. “You know, Tommy’s Horn? Well, Tommy’s decoy Horn. We wanted Vince to leave with it, right?” When I continued to stare down at him in disbelief, he frowned. “Baby, do you not remember? Oh, shit, did you hit your head?” He trailed his fingers gently over the back of my scalp, looking for a lump.
I grabbed his hand and pulled it down. “Are you fucking kidding me? You… you… were pretending?”
“Well… yeah? I mean, I did not intend to get taken hostage. That was a serious miscalculation and terrifying as fuck. But then you were there, and you looked like an avenging angel, telling Vince that you loved me, and I thought, ‘Get it together, Taffet. Champ’s fucking counting on you.’ And… yeah. So. Did I do okay?”
I pressed my lips to his right there in the middle of the hall, and Quinn Taffet kissed me back. He tasted like life and hope and everything I’d never let myself believe I could have.
And I was seriously going to kill him.
“What were you thinking, coming all the way over here? You were supposed to be out at the bunkhouse with Levi and Marissa! You were supposed to stay safely away from all this.”
“I know, but I… I couldn’t stand not knowing how it was going, not knowing if you were okay.” His eyes shone with love and sincerity. It was impossible for me to stay angry when he looked at me that way, and I hoped he never realized that, otherwise, he’d have me wrapped around his finger even more firmly for the rest of my days. “I was just going to hide in the mudroom until it was over, but then…”
“Vince found you.”
Quinn nodded. “I thought he was already downstairs. I thought I could help if you needed me to.”
I kissed him again, gently this time. “If the roles were reversed, I’d have felt the same,” I admitted. “But baby, I have training you don’t have.”
“And yet, some untrained people get involved in their partners’ business all the time.” He raised an eyebrow at me pertly. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Wedding Piñata?”
“That’s totally different. You are not going to be my partner in the security business, Quinn Taffet,” I informed him. I heaved myself to my feet and hauled him after me, running my hands over his cashmere coat to check him for bruises, but like me, he seemed to be mostly fine.
“Hush. I’ll be your silent partner,” Quinn said, patting my chest soothingly. “Don’t worry, we’ll work up to it.”
I shook my head and fought hard against a smile. “This is the rest of my life now, huh?”
“Pretty much, yeah. You having regrets?”
I hauled him up against me and bit his lower lip. “Not a single one.”